We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Not paying corporation tax is an advantage to those who don’t pay it as against those who do. Which is what we’ve been saying about corporate and capital taxation all along. If you tax corporations then there will be less investment in them in your economy. This makes everyone poorer – the deadweight costs are high. This is indeed exactly the same reasoning which leads us to insisting, as a result of optimal tax theory, that we shouldn’t be taxing the corporations at all.
Which is interesting, even amusing, don’t you think? The EU’s justification for why they just must tax companies is the very reason basic theory says we shouldn’t be taxing corporations at all.
– Tim Worstall
The #SaveYourUber petition has, as of 10:45 pm in London, attracted 600,000+ names, and one of them is mine.
Of course the best way to save Uber is to get rid of Sadiq Khan and make the issue politically radioactive.
This may seem a rather strange proposition, but in terms of ‘housekeeping’, there are various aspects to running a ‘household’, and I am comparing the financial discipline and general acumen of the First Lord of the Treasury (aka Mrs May) making the analogy to running the national ‘house’ to the practical but non-monetary skills of a badger, or rather, some badgers local to me.
The other day I found a badgers’ latrine on my morning walk, it was rather obvious, a ‘not-quite steaming’ pile and I immediately thought of the Prime Minister. I was struck by how careful the badger is to look after his household (or rather, his sett) and not to dump in it, instead using a carefully-dug latrine. This one was unusual in that it was very close to the roadside and highly visible.
Whereas it seems that the Prime Minister is quite happy to dump on the country a €20,000,000,000 bill for the privilege of leaving the EU and letting the UK run a trade deficit with them, and also dump a load of regulations on the UK. If you are going to make a payment, at the bloody least make it in Sterling, so the Bank of England can QE the money out of thin air (if this has to be done at all, which it doesn’t) and they can spend their nice pounds rather than HMG buy Euros. The good folk at Lawyers for Britain have debunked the case for any payment to be made for leaving. How about telling the EU that if your income falls, you cut costs, so that there are fewer than 10,000 in the EU earning more than the UK’s Prime Minister (which ought not to be an ‘office of profit’ under the Crown anyway).
The plan to graft into UK law all EU Regulations has at least the attraction of providing certainty, but why not plan a bonfire ‘On Day 1‘ to quote the Donald (yeah, it still hasn’t happened).
So if I have to choose between the two?
 or 
Having had to negotiate with a badger at 3 am one winter morning to get him to leave my garden, in my pyjamas and armed with only a garden fork for self-defence (this is England), I can testify that they do not give up a position easily, but my bluff worked.
To be fair to Mrs May, the badger seems to know instinctively not to foul its home, however, this is a skill that some of our politicians have yet to learn, and they are so very busy doing the opposite, it may take some time for them to lose their habits, but why?
Photo credits: Per Wikipedia, The Rt. Hon. T May MP, per Controller of HMSO – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Badgerhero.
Patrick Crozier has written his own thoughts on this just now, but I have some thoughts of my own. I cannot remember being so angry about a decision out of London for some time.
Brian Micklethwait and others on this blog have written in the past about why Uber is such a big deal in how the case for capitalism and the free market can be made. And I have already seen evidence from people who are on the Left side of the spectrum that they are angry about this ban, in ways that are not always intellectually consistent, but also useful in showing how this could be a teachable moment about free enterprise. Consider that tens of thousands of Uber drivers will no longer be able to earn a living in this way; sure, some of them will work for other taxi firms as they try to fill the gap that is left, but that will take a certain amount of time. Established taxi firms such as Addison Lee are no doubt delighted. Car leasing firms will see drivers sell up, causing goodness-knows what troubles. Besides the drivers, there are also all those software and support service people who will be made redundant. Many of them are young and may not be all that political; some may even be quite leftist. What will they think of Labour now, I wonder? All those bearded hipsters dreaming of creating clever businesses have been told, in essence, to fuck off unless you do something that doesn’t challenge anyone too much. Great.
For all that Mr Khan likes to strike poses as being more supposedly electable than Jeremy Corbyn, he shows that under all the different images, he is an advocate of rent-seeking socialism, happy to play to whatever unionised groups are around. He talks endlessly about the need for “more resources”, and has been remarkably useless as far as I can see in terms of making London safer overall. In fact, one safety casualty of banning Uber and similar entities is that it will once again be quite difficult at times for people to get a taxi, such as late at night and in bad weather, increasing the risks to people in certain situations. The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Another effect of this ban is the message it broadcasts to the wider world and those of business: make sure you pay politicians lots of money and creep up to them, otherwise we could find fault and ban you. If you disrupt unionised, regulated business models you are unwelcome, and will be punished. And the kicker is that the current mayor is a Remainer, a man who has, fatuously, claimed that our exit from the Single Market is a disaster because of the loss of trading opportunities. Well, it appears that his enthusiasm for such things is limited when practical, actual cases of competition arise.
Anyway, here is a press statement from the Institute of Economic Affairs, which neatly summarises the issues. It comes from Mark Littlewood, Director General at the IEA:
“Transport for London’s decision to not renew Uber’s license strikes a huge blow to competition and innovation within London’s transport market. If this ruling is upheld, it will ruin flexible working opportunities for the 40,000 city drivers who use the app – many for their livelihood, and many to top-up low wages.
“The ruling also inconveniences the 3.5 million Londoners who regularly use the service, and reasserts the dominance of the city’s taxi cartel, which only the wealthiest residents can afford to use with any sense of frequency.
“Apps like Uber have a large role to play in our increasingly dynamic economy, and it is a mistake to cling onto out-dated views of working arrangements. Uber is not an ’employer’ – it is simply a platform that allows drivers and customers to meet and trade under a specific set of rules.
“Banning Uber, and clamping down on the Gig Economy more generally, is a restriction upon freedom of choice, both for Uber’s drivers and passengers. In doing so, Transport for London has privileged the views of a powerful minority who wish to restrict consumer choice over the will of millions of ordinary Londoners.”
“Today’s decision is an assault on drivers and customers alike, and a victory for protectionism.”
In 8 days time.
Fuckers.
Lots of people – including some Uber supporters – saying stupid things.
Talking of which, I see Sargon of Akkad – he of This Week in Stupid – has been “unpublished” on Facebook.
What a shit day.
There is an important law of which government bureaucracies would take cognisance if good government were their aim: that once a method of measurement is used to set a target, it becomes so corrupted that what it measures bears no relation to what it is supposed to measure.
[…]
A further force for corruption is the accelerating overproduction of people with higher degrees compared with the number of opportunities there are to employ them in their field. This increases yet further the pressure to publish, the majority of what is published consequently being of doubtful quality.
– Theodore Dalrymple
The joint Chinese-Russian naval exercises presently going on in the northern Pacific are presented as normal “we do this every year” – but they are clearly an anti American move, threatening Japan and in support of North Korea. Although perhaps not the present dictator of North Korea – the Chinese-Russian alliance may have someone else in mind for this role.
From Europe (the Baltic States, and the Ukraine, and everywhere else), to the Middle East (the joint Chinese-Russian alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran and associated irregular forces such as the “Party of God” in Lebanon and Syria), to the Far East and the Pacific, the alliance of the People’s Republic of China and Mr Putin’s Russia is a Clear and Present Danger to the West.
And everyone, apart from powerless people, is ignoring this danger. Mr Putin is not going anywhere – and he was trained, over many years, to hate the West – not for ideological reasons (he is not a Marxist), but simply as an opponent who-must-be-defeated (the endless agitprop attacks from “RT” against the West show the obsession of Mr Putin). And the regime in China is thought of as a wonderful business opportunity, in spite of the fact that this mercantalist regime has run up massive trade surpluses for many years now – crippling the West with debt which the West has used to finance CONSUMPTION not productive investment. The People’s Republic of China’s true nature as an extremely aggressive nationalistic (Han Chinese ethnic supremacist) dictatorship bent on military modernisation and endless expansion taking-over-ever-more-lands-and-seas, is still not really understood. The PRC is not a big version of Taiwan – it is a ruthless dictatorship, bent upon expansion.
Of course the rising power of China is not in the long term interests of Russia – but Mr Putin is myopic, his training has given him the view that the West is the great enemy of Russia. He is focused on this mythical threat – and ignores the real long term threat, the People’s Republic of China. Indeed he is locked in an alliance with the PRC against the West.
Future historians will doubtless be wary of books on the history of the Negro in the United States when they find the word “Negro” being displaced by the word “Black” in the 1960s and 1970s – just as they are wary of books on German history in the era when the word “Aryan” became fashionable. … The history of the Negro American began to be chronicled, and was being well-chronicled, before “Black” became fashionable. … The “Black Studies” movement has tended to inflame the subject without proportionately illuminating it, and has become the Trojan Horse of a new racism.
(Daniel Boorstin, ‘The Democratic Experience’, 1973)
It’s more than 40 years since Daniel wrote this – and less than 4 since I first saw “All Lives Matter” called racist by those who shout “Black Lives Matter”.
– I’ve read minutes of meetings of tiny lefty groups in Victorian London where other members patiently explained to Karl Marx that his theories had flaws. Since then, the world has been force-fed a huge slice of socialism. You might have thought it died in the 90’s – or at least transmogrified into watermelonish (green on the outside, red on the inside) environmentalism, but Sanders and Corbyn want to put us back on the straight stuff.
– In late 1991, before the first gulf war faded and the recession kicked in, I recall a UK article explaining why the Democratic presidential hopefuls were being called (by their unhappy US media friends) “the seven dwarfs”. It listed the failings of each in turn; 5th on the list came Clinton, whose dwarfishness was because of sleaze and even more because “The Democrats know that more sleaze is coming on the Clintons.” (‘Clintons’, plural, even then, IIRC.) Well, that was true, but across-the-pond had 8 years of Clintons and just missed having a second helping.
When mainsteam media like you, your lies are long a-dying. The new racism (anti-semitic, like the old) is still on its first growth cycle. I am so ready to reach Boorstin’s future when historians will “doubtless” doubt it.
[Boorstin’s quote is on page 648 of the Pheonix Press 2000 paperback edition]
On Monday I watched (via the wonders of television) the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mrs May, visiting the Prime Minister of Canada.
Mrs May declared that what she had in common with the Prime Minister of Canada (the “shared values” between the United Kingdom and Canada) were a belief in the use of the power of international government to “empower women” (i.e. stupid Frankfurt School of Marxism stuff – which Mrs May is too ignorant to know is from the Frankfurt School of Marxism), and the desire to work with internet companies to stamp out “hateful” and “extreme” “opinions” – in short the same Fascist (and I mean the word “Fascist” literally – government getting private companies to help crush dissent) agenda Mrs May has had since she was Home Secretary. And if anyone things the target of this censorship campaign will be Islam they are a fool – the target is far more likely to be (indeed already is) people who OPPOSE Islam, which Mrs May (like the demented Prime Minister of Canada) thinks is a “religion of peace”, “distorted” by a few “extremists”.
The one advantage of having Mrs May (this tin pot Fascist – who also takes on board Cultural Marxism stuff without even knowing what it is) as the unelected Leader of the Conservative Party was that, for some bizarre reason, she was supposed to be popular with the voters – the General Election exposed that spin as a lie, a massive lie. Mrs May barely held off the Marxist Labour Party (John McDonnell and co). and it is not astonishing that she failed so badly – as the Conservative Party Manifesto language exposed the fact that Mrs May has nothing but hatred and contempt for people who actually believe in LIBERTY. The lady, and her “bring the country together” allies, offered no alternative vision to Mr Jeremy Corbyn, just mental confusion and (to use her own favourite word) a “nasty” manner. Mr Corbyn, although I hate to admit it, has some personal charm – Mrs May has none, the person comes over as lecturing, arrogant, patronising and (above all) ignorant. Most ordinary voters can not stand the sight or sound of Mrs May – she sucks all the energy out of a room leaving everyone in despair at her failure to inspire them.
I despise this person, Mrs May, and yet I am committed (by party loyalty) to not denounce her in public – although, as I am a nobody, it would not matter if I did denounce her – it would only harm me to do so, not her. Perhaps I am as a big a hypocrite as Mrs May herself – who uses the Times newspaper to attack her own Foreign Secretary for the terrible crime of saying we should stop giving the European Union money when we leave it.
As ever, Paris was the place to see really hot models, but you have missed your chance. A couple of years ago they were basking in the admiration of the world. Now, they are looking a little old. However you can still read about them in today’s Times:
We were wrong — worst effects of climate change can be avoided, say scientists
Catastrophic impacts of climate change can still be avoided, according to scientists who have admitted they were too pessimistic about the chances of limiting global warming.
The world has warmed more slowly than had been predicted by computer models, which were “on the hot side” and overstated the impact of emissions on average temperature, research has found.
New forecasts suggest that the world has a better chance than claimed of meeting the goal set by the Paris Agreement on climate change of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The study, published in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience, makes clear that rapid reductions in emissions will still be required but suggests that the world has more time to make the necessary changes.
Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one of the study’s authors, admitted that his previous prediction had been wrong.
He stated during the climate summit in Paris in December 2015: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.”
Emphasis added. Professor Grubb was not alone. An article in New Scientist from December 2015 that included that quote from Professor Grubb also said,
And time has nearly run out for limiting warming to 2 °C. “If we wait until 2020, it will be too late,” climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre in the UK told New Scientist on Friday. “It’s a very small window.”
As for 1.5 °C, it would take nothing less than “a true world revolution”, according to Piers Forster of the University of Leeds. “We need renewable energy, nuclear power, fracking, zero-carbon transport, energy efficiency, housing changes,” he said. “Even international aviation and shipping that were excluded from this report will need to be tackled within the next few years.”
I remain more of a believer in anthropogenic climate change than many here, but after three or four cycles of this, cynicism does creep in. There is the cycle of direct prediction: DOOM BY YEAR X > two years before year X doom has failed to show any sign of arrival > DOOM BY X+10 AND WE TOTALLY HAVE GOT IT RIGHT THIS TIME. As with the lifecycle of the periodical cicada, whole theses could be written about how the the swarming and dying off of predictions of climate doom is correlated with the emergence and retreat of predictions that the only way to avoid climate doom is a globally imposed command economy. There is a long, slow rising line in which something like Professor Forster’s “true world revolution” is more and more incontrovertibly the only chance, until the date it is going to be needed to be done by becomes so close that (a) it obviously ain’t gonna happen, and (b) people start saying that if “our only chance” is something that obviously ain’t gonna happen, we might as well take our tune from the besieged citizens of Jerusalem in Isiah 22:13 and have joy and revelry, slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep, eating of meat and drinking of wine, for tomorrow we die. At this point the trendline for true world revolution being the only solution falls off a scarp slope and the one for mere socialist austerity just possibly being enough (if we start now) starts to rise.
And that is where we find ourselves with this most recent paper in Nature Geoscience,
Speaking to The Times, he [Professor Grubb] said: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as Keynes said.
That line from Keynes has long bugged me. For every one occasion when the facts truly change there are ten where the facts are the same as ever and all that has changed is that the speaker finally had to stop running away from them. It is a phrase that sounds like open-mindedness, but in fact avoids the need to admit error. Having said that, it is better to make like slippery Keynes than to make your opinions completely impervious to reality, and Professor Grubb has done better than Keynes in that he has said he was wrong.
“It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.”
Professor Grubb said that the new assessment was good news for small island states in the Pacific, such as the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, which could be inundated by rising seas if the average temperature rose by more than 1.5C.
“Pacific islands are less doomed than we thought,” he said.
Tuvalu’s doom level has been fluctuating since at least 2004.
Professor Grubb added that other factors also pointed to more optimism on climate change, including China reducing its growth in emissions much faster than predicted and the cost of offshore wind farms falling steeply in the UK.
He said: “We’re in the midst of an energy revolution and it’s happening faster than we thought, which makes it much more credible for governments to tighten the offer they put on the table at Paris.”
The study found that a group of computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had predicted a more rapid temperature increase than had actually occurred.
The global average temperature has risen by about 0.9C since pre-industrial times but there was a slowdown in the rate of warming for 15 years before 2014.
Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and another author of the paper, said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”
He said that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government research institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”.
Here the cynic in me says that it is not that surprising in a different way that a dozen models were all wrong in the same direction. But, again, let us not be too down on Professor Grubb – at least he is partly acknowledging that scientific models are often uncertain, as Michael Jennings drew on his own experience as a research scientist to say on this blog in 2009.
He [Professor Grubb] said that too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming.
See, I promised you hot models and here are so many hot models, you may even get tired of hot models.
Commenting on the case, Sue Hemming, head of the CPS’s special crime and counterterrorism division, said: ‘People should not assume they can hide on social media when stirring up hatred and violence.’ Evidently, they cannot. But to what end? What is the benefit to society of banning the expression of bad and hateful ideas? Surely we want these ideas out in the open so that we can combat them with better ideas and better arguments. Censorship won’t change anyone’s mind.
– Naomi Firsht
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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